Joshua Watson, PhD: We’ve been developing patient clinical experience timelines, including adverse events, surgeries, and treatments, using Lens. By pairing gene expression with these timelines, which often include multiple samples per patient, we can correlate treatments with gene expression changes. While Lens’ structured data provides valuable information, it doesn’t fully capture the complexity of a patient’s disease journey. That’s where Patient Explorer, a feature within Lens that allows researchers and scientists to define and refine patient cohorts using a broad set of filters, comes in. It builds a data matrix for each patient based on physician notes, which I, as a PhD, don’t typically review. For instance, I can input patient characteristics and query metastatic locations. Patient Explorer then provides an answer, citing relevant physician notes that would take me hours to sift through normally. I can now answer a question about 200 patients in five minutes. This allows me to identify patterns that I can then discuss with clinicians like Dr. Posadas, who can translate those patterns into clinically relevant insights.
Edwin Posadas, MD: To contextualize what Josh said, with osteotropic prostate cancer, we see variations like visceral metastases that correlate with poorer outcomes. So, understanding the sequence of metastatic sites and related events offers insights into biological changes. This allows us to investigate if these signals were present at diagnosis or developed through treatments. This requires temporal analysis across the disease’s natural history and contextualizing it with genomic information that is acquired throughout the disease’s timeline. As Josh mentioned, this is a laborious manual process. However, Tempus’ generative AI tools enable us to rapidly explore these variations. We can iteratively examine how specific events correlate with clinical outcomes, such as treatment benefits or metastasis patterns. This also allows us to analyze time-on-treatment variations. For example, we can compare treatment responses in patients with specific metastatic and gene expression patterns, which is incredibly unique and gives us a leg up by significantly accelerating our research.
|